The Only Way Out Is Through: Uncovering Queer Archival Silences on Trauma with the Dream House

Abstract

A literary analysis of Carmen Maria Machado's "In The Dream House," demonstrating its placement and significance as evidence of queer archival memory through its narrative on trauma. This paper serves its goal in two primary forms— analyzing passages from Machado’s novel to better understand the episodic nature of trauma and the delicate relationship between identifying trauma in a queer narrative without completely separating or combining the two, as well as taking what we see from this literature and demonstrating how Machado’s individual, autobiographical experiences work to fill these gaps in the archive.